Eva Hesse, Datebooks 1964 / 65

Eva Hesse

Datebooks
1964/65

A Facsimile Edition

Edited by Allen Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio
Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2006
Introduction by S. Folie, Transcript and Annotations by G. Holz, E. Kernbauer
21.5 x 18 cm. 314 pages
decorative box
Text in English language
ISBN 978-030011109

Eva Hesse's (1936-1975) visionary work has found approval primarly after her death. As one of the central female protagonists of 20th century art she was a pioneer in the field of object art: She designed her works from industrial manufactured products, that still have an aura of aloofness. The artist herself had a playful approach to her art.

In 1964/65, Eva Hesse (1936-1975) lived in Kettwig-on-the-Ruhr, Germany, at the invitation of a European art collector. During this time, as she did throughout most of her life, Hesse kept diaries and made extensive notations in datebook calendars.

These two datebooks, published for the first time as facsimile editions, are accompanied by a third volume that includes an essay on their significance in the artist's career as well as full transcriptions and annotations.

The "1964/65 Datebooks" impart astonishingly rich personal details about the artist's life: whom she met and where, which books she read, and which films and exhibitions she had seen and what impression they made on her. Hesse's notations also reveal invaluable insights into the German art scene of the mid-1960s, her transition from working with drawings and painting to sculpture, her often conflicted artistic ambitions, the stresses of her marriage, and the difficulties of returning to Germany, a country she fled as a child with her parents in 1938 in order to escape the Nazis.